The death of sportswriting
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Illustration: Maura Kearns/Axios
With the closure of the Washington Post sports section, sports journalism lost one of its last crown jewels, and one of media's most prestigious professions was handed a crushing blow.
Why it matters: The marquee platforms of sportswriting have been gutted and shuttered over the last decade — victims of cold, hard media business realities and the evolving demands of the modern sports fan.
The big picture: There have never been more ways for sports fans to watch and learn about their favorite teams and players. But increasingly, those needs are met with content from non-journalists.
- Services once supplied by beat reporters, columnists and feature writers are now performed by a constellation of podcast commentators, online fan communities and players going direct to fans.
Zoom out: The last 10+ years have seen the hollowing out of storied publications like Sports Illustrated and Sporting News, the end of ESPN's magazine and Grantland and the erosion of local newsrooms' sports sections before the Washington Post announcement.
- The New York Times cut its sports section after it acquired The Athletic in 2022 — one of the few reporting-driven publications that has emerged in the current sports media landscape.
Between the lines: Today's sports fans can get most of what they need without the help of reporting.
- Through social media, they can watch highlights, find stats and absorb commentary from a game they didn't catch.
- Through fantasy and gambling apps, they put their skin in the game to try to win money.
- Through podcasts and blogs, they can get smarter about teams and leagues they follow from experts who contextualize, rather than produce, information.
Fans are able to get access to players without relying on journalists who were once their main portals for learning about them.
- Athletes shape the message and enjoy commercial proceeds through podcasts and player-controlled documentaries rather than relying on journalists to deliver their message.
- Fans get a look into the (curated) lives of athletes through social media. It's increasingly rare to read something revealing about an athlete that they wouldn't want you to know — unless that information comes from a police report.
ESPN, the company synonymous with sports media, has leaned in to entertainment and away from journalism in recent years.
- It shut down its prestige culture and sportswriting site Grantland in 2015 before ending ESPN the Magazine in 2019. Shows featuring reporters gave way to shows featuring debaters.
- In a sign of how the field is evolving, the company launched the ESPN Creator Network a few years ago, featuring a stable of social media influencers.
What's next: Transactional information and player movement rumors are among the remaining products of sports reporting that readers still crave.
- But that information is instantly commodified through social media aggregation and has a shelf life of minutes. Value is stripped from the publications with those reporters.
- That information comes from prominent national reporters, but also dutiful local beat writers who supply much of the info feeding the wider universe of sports talk, gambling and fantasy — krill at the bottom of the food chain.
The ecosystem will survive, but with less information and fewer stories to feed it.
